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BY<br />

CHAPTER XX<br />

The Birthday of the Prophet<br />

far the best of the Mohammedan festivals we saw<br />

in Cairo, better even than the return of the Mahmal<br />

and the Pilgrims from Mecca, was the Molid-en-Nebbi<br />

the Birthday of the Prophet.<br />

For some days all the Arabs had been in a ferment. I<br />

asked them what was in the air. They told me " The<br />

birthday of the Prophet," but, Arab-like, they did not<br />

know on what exact day it would happen. The only means<br />

by which I could find it out was by inquiring on what<br />

day all the public offices in Cairo were to have their<br />

holiday.<br />

For about a week before, booths were erected in the<br />

principal thoroughfares, especially on the road to Abbassiya,<br />

in which, in spite of the admonitions in the Koran against<br />

making images of living things, they sold figures, in red<br />

and white sugar and jelly : here an elephant, there a camel,<br />

there the old hero Ibrahim Pasha on his charger ; and<br />

absurd sugar dolls dressed in paper. The booths had<br />

special decorations, but I could not discover their significance.<br />

When the day came the editor of the principal native paper<br />

came to drive us to the Molid, for he had procured an<br />

invitation for us from the Sheikh-el-Bekri, the nearest<br />

descendant of the Prophet in all Egypt.<br />

The festival of the Molid takes place on the waste plains<br />

of Abbassiya, which serve as a kind of Campus Martius for<br />

military reviews and occasions like the present. In the<br />

two or three miles' drive which separate it from Cairo I<br />

15<br />

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